Telecommunication service providers build thousands of inter-office facility circuits every week. There are no clear quantitative and objective criteria on defining, guiding, and validating facility level routing within the traditional local exchange server ILEC network management support systems, such as the trunks integrated record keeping system (TIRKS). As a result, the process of managing this routing is an ad-hoc manual approach.
Assume a Local Access Transport Area (LATA) with 50 wire centers (offices). If a cross section is defined as the pair of wire centers where a customer's circuit enters and exits the interoffice network, then there are 1,225 A-Z “cross sections” within the LATA ([N×(N−1)]/2). For each unique A-Z cross section, there are typically many different ways that circuits between these two points can be routed within the network. Some of these routes make efficient use of the network facilities, and many of them don't.
Transport planners are continually adding new capacity into the network as the existing capacity is used to meet customer demand. As new capacity is added, some of it will be added in such a manner that creates new alternatives for routing future customer demand. As a result, what used to be the most efficient way to route traffic in certain cross sections will become inefficient due to subsequently deployed technology and/or routes. Absent a comprehensive preferred route reference, it is impossible for the Provisioning group to take the time to ensure that every circuit is designed using the most efficient route. In addition, absent a comprehensive preferred route reference, it is very difficult to programmatically audit the new circuits to be provisioned to determine if they have been efficiently designed. The result is that many circuits are designed and provisioned that are more complex than they need to be. This added complexity produces a number of negative consequences. (1) They take Operations longer to turn up, reducing their productivity (2) they have more potential points of failure, decreasing MTTF (3) they are more difficult to troubleshoot, extending MTTR and (4) they consume more facilities than are required, necessitating deployment of more facilities than required, increasing unit costs.
Accordingly, an improved method for documenting preferred routing within the network, and the ability to detect new circuit designs that do not follow preferred routing is needed.
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